If 2016 saw the end of Lakmahal as it had been known and loved for near 80 years, ‘ a home to so many’ as my cousin Nirmali described it recently, that year had also seen the deaths of many who had been part and parcel of my life, and the life of my parents. In fact the period since my father’s death, at the end of August 2014, had seen the departure of many of those who had been integral to our lives.

In November that year I heard from Anne Ranasinghe that Dr Vimala Navaratnam had died in England, having gone there to look after her daughter during some surgery. She had looked after all of us with enormous dedication over nearly half a century, and had kept me going, along with my cousin Theja, in that last week when I was alone at home with my father as he faded.

Anne was as appreciative of Vimala as we were, stating matter of factly a couple of years earlier that she was still alive only because Vimala had insisted she go to hospital when she had suffered a heart attack. Anne had been determined to stay at home, which she later realized would have meant death. But Vimala, ably assisted by the admirable equally kindly and impeccably professional Dr Sheriffdeen, had got her to hospital. I interviewed Anne shortly after she returned home, and was admitted for I think the first time to her bedroom upstairs, where she held forth admirably for the series called ‘The Past is Another Country’. This was devised by the brilliant Croatian television producer Daniel Ridicki, who has now set it up on vimeo, as what he sees as a seminal aspect of Sri Lankan cultural history. The series, which includes interviews with Iranganie Serasinghe and Laki Senanayake, can be seen on http://www.ridicki.net/the_past_is_another_country.html

My aunt Ena refused to be interviewed, which I was sad about, but perhaps she knew she would not have done herself justice. She was fading by then, and in October 2015 she passed away, having memorably told me the week before, when I had gone up to Aluwihare for her 93rd birthday, that I should not be sad, for we had had such good times. When I spent the night of 31st December with her the previous year, on my way back from electioneering for Maithripala Sirisena in Jaffna, she had told me she was ready to go. I told her this was unthinkable for, citing my grandmother and my father, I told her that our family lasted until they were 93. She was only 92 then, and she asked me whether I thought she had to go on for another year. She died, in fact, a week after her 93rd birthday. Continue reading →

In those years of constant change in the mid-nineties, continuity in terms of family life was provided most solidly by my aunt Ena. We had become great friends way back in 1983, when my adventures at S. Thomas’ had prompted her to seek to get to know me better. We got on superbly from the start, and as she said on her 90th birthday, when it was clear that she was dying, there was no reason to be sad for we had had such good times together.

These were first and foremost at Aluwihare, her wonderful home in the hills, which she had transformed into a magic retreat, full of colour and exotic artefacts. In addition to the batik and the embroidery done by her girls, as she still called them a quarter of a century after they had begun working with her, she had created employment for the boys of the village too, a carpentry shed and then a brass foundry. And then she had also started a restaurant, not one but two for she had no sense of restraint, K1 as she called it down the hill from her home where meals could be booked by tour groups, K2 on the roadside, which was not only a Kitchen but also provided rooms to stay.

The first was catered to by her own cook, Suja who she claimed could not boil water when she had first come to work, but who now produced the most marvelous concoctions. The other provided work for the middle aged ladies of the village, some of them relations. Though they exuded confusion as they bustled about, they were quite charming, and those who stayed and those who ate were entranced. The American ambassador, Peter Burleigh, used it seems to stay there often, which may well have been for nefarious purposes, but he was dearly loved by the ladies.

We had gone down often to Yala in the eighties, with memorable holidays during the times of turmoil, when we had the Park practically to ourselves. But when the JVP insurrection was over, more and more people began to visit, so we found other places too, Uda Walawe and Horton Plains and more frequently Wasgomuwa, which was a relatively short journey from Alu, over the Knuckles range to the Eastern plain. Continue reading →

I also much relished in my new job the opportunities I had to travel outside Colombo, to explore again and again what I had once described as the widest range of beauty to be found in the smallest compass in the whole world.

I had got used to frequent travel in my last years at the British Council, first for the office on the Furniture Project which had been started for the North and East soon after the Indo-Lankan Accord. When that unraveled, we had persuaded the Overseas Development Administration to transfer the funds to two other Districts, in addition to Amparai, which remained comparatively safe for travel.

The two selected, because of their proximity to the East, were Matale and Matara. I was able therefore to drop in frequently on my Aunt Ena in Aluwihare and on my father’s brother and his wife in Getamanna. But I also stayed often in Resthouses, and grew to love what I saw as their unity in diversity. The country had a range at different levels of comfort and cleanliness, ranging from the dingy old one at Mahiyangana to the lovely new one in the same city, on the bank of the Mahaweli. I loved too the little ones, at Batulu Oya, and Weerawila overlooking the reservoir, and Anamaduwa looking over paddy fields when Chandrika first changed the clocks and the evening stretched out for ages, as I remembered from Summer Time at Oxford. Continue reading →

I could never really reciprocate Ena’s hospitality by hosting her myself, but I did try in various ways on various occasions. The first was vicarious, in that I arranged an Exhibition for her at the British Council, and obtained the use of the former Representative’s house for not only the display but also as a place to stay for some of the vast brood she brought down.

The house had been built by Geoffrey Bawa near the entrance to the premises that he had constructed in 1982 by joining two old bank houses together. These colonial style buildings had been embellished by a colonnaded corridor, and looked splendid. The much lower two storied house on the other side had a matching façade, and the downstairs looked very elegant, but it was not an easy place in which to live. The Representative who had supervised the buildings, Vere Atkinson, loved it, but his successor, the boss I have most enjoyed working for, loathed the place. Vere said it was because he had a Swedish style wife who could not cope with a Bawa style house, but when I saw the poky upstairs, after they had left, I realized how difficult it must have been to survive there, with several children too.

Where Piyadasa and Suja stayed on for decades, Ena’ drivers changed over the years, as did her mode of transport. When I first went up to Alu, she had a Toyota double cab, driven by Sena, a portly old man with a shock of white hair that made him look immensely distinguished. In those days Ena drove around often, going into town to buy her groceries and whatever else took her fancy, and setting off every afternoon on an excursion into the hills and valleys surrounding Matale.

It was nothing in those days for us to set off after lunch to Wireless Kanda, as we called the highest point in the hills to the East, before the road dropped down to Pallebadda and then to the area around Girandurukotte where lands had been opened up for settlers under the Accelerated Mahaweli Scheme. That was the area too in which later the Wasgamuwa Park was set up, so the drive became familiar for quite another reason in the nineties. In the eighties however it was purely to loaf, getting up to the highest point before the mists rose, and then driving back as the sun set.

Suja unlike Piyadasa had a family from the start, though her husband had vanished long before she settled into the household. Ena claimed that, when she first settled down in Alu after returning from the Virgin Islands, Suja was simply a household help who did not know even to boil water. There had been another cook in residence then, but she had obviously been unable to cope with Ena’s style of cooking and entertaining, and before long Suja had taken over. Our first trip down to the Sinharaja, when she improvised lunch on the banks of the Walawe Reservoir, was I believe her first great performance, and from then she never looked back.

She fell in energetically with Ena’s style of mixing things up at will, and though she never quite added passion fruit juice to coffee, as Ena claimed she might well have done in her enthusiasm to try new things, she certainly performed marvels when asked to turn patties into curry or cook ham with marmalade. Ena’s, or rather Suja’s, chutneys and jams were pure joy, made of tart berries and strange spices, and she deep fried to perfection, with an array of exotic leaves and thinly sliced vegetables appearing at intervals in the course of a meal.

For there were also days of immense joy and tranquility at Alu. I have never found Colombo congenial, and from childhood on I would spend weeks during vacations with friends and relations who lived outside the capital. My favourite refuge was the Old Place in Kurunegala, but I also spent many happy holidays with W J Fernando when he was Government Agent in Kandy. There had also been one or two stays with Hope Todd, also in Kandy, before he moved to Colombo, and afterwards, when he went back there on work and stayed in the little house in Reeves Gardens which he continued to maintain. Memorable too were a couple of long stays with Derrick Nugawela on his estate in Bogowantalawa.

By the time I came back from Oxford however all that had changed, with Derrick in Australia and Hope and WJ firmly settled in Colombo. My aunt Lakshmi still continued at Old Place for a few years more, and I stayed there frequently, but the place was clearly on its last legs. That in itself did not really matter much, for I was quite content to do nothing all day except write, just as I had done nothing all day as a schoolboy except read. But what did matter was that Lakshmi and I did not have very much to say to each other. In the old days we had discussed books, and she had provided me with lots of exciting modern stuff to read, but by the eighties she was not reading very much, and we had less to say to each other about books and writers.

Another memorable loaf, as Ena called these meanders, was in 1992, with Nirmali Hettiarachchi, who did a lot of work with me at the British Council, and who had also become a fast friend of Ena’s over the years. This trip also had a wild life component, for it included the Wasgamuwa Park which had not yet properly opened, and also Maduru Oya, which was off limits to the public.

Our key to enter was Shirley Perera, who had joined Ena the previous year when she set up her Carpentry Training Workshop. He had initially come for a few days, to help also with the Exhibition that was held at the British Council to reintroduce her work to Colombo, and then he stayed on for over a decade. He still goes back to help when she has any major assignment to which he can contribute, and continues a regular on her trips to the jungle.

I spent several Christmases with Ena at Yala and later at Wasgamuwa. The first of these was in 1987, when her daughter Kusum too joined us, and Ena decorated the Bungalow and its surroundings magically, Japanese lanterns winking at us through the trees as dusk fell. We were in Talgasmankada, the most distant bungalow, on the banks of the Manik Ganga. In those early days we would regularly venture also into Block Two, which required a permit and very steady driving in a good vehicle. Raji furnished both, and we would have long days out in that arid plain, a marked contrast to the lush jungle of Block One. We rarely saw anything, but the landscape was enchanting, and the picnics in isolated spots of green that had sprung up around scarce sources of water.

A friend from England joined us for two more Christmases, in 1990 and 1991, when Kusum came out again with the husband she had married in 1989, at a series of weddings including a spectacular ceremony at Alu at the height of the JVP problems. In 1990 there were just a few of us, which was bliss, though Kusum terrified poor John, having decided that someone who had been to Oxford and taught at Eton needed to be taken down a peg. This was grossly unfair, for John was never obtrusive about his position, but as Ena said, Kusum was just being Kusum. To me she was absolutely charming, and it was a pleasure to talk to someone so obviously bright who was keenly interested in the social and political upheavals going on in Sri Lanka at the time, without the partisan commitments evinced by so many in what might be termed the Colombo establishment.

There were several more trips to Yala that year, and one to Wilpattu for the April New Year holidays. Richard was meant to come with us, but we also asked his mother Manorani, at which point he declared that he had too much work and could not get away. Like many markedly self aware people, he was determined to keep the various aspects of his life apart. I had realized this the previous year, when he had asked me to spend some time with him and Manorani at Kadirana, at a small estate bungalow not too far from Colombo which was owned by a cousin of his father. The first evening was delightful, but the next day he decided that he had to get back to Colombo for work, and we did not see very much of him in the days that followed. Manorani and I had a great time together, me writing, she sleeping most of the time and reading trashy novels, but it was always fun to have Richard back, even if late at night, with time only for a hasty breakfast next morning.

While we were at Wilpattu, typically, he turned up on his motor-bike, which he had bought in the days we taught together at 8th Lane, falling off regularly and cultivating spectacular bruises, but ploughing on with his efforts to master the monster. He spent a few hours with us, claiming he was en route to some assignment. In fact this was true, for it was in those days that he had begun doing propaganda work for Lalith Athulathmudali who had recently taken up the position of Minister of National Security. Lalith had been a great friend of Manorani, and then of Richard, who saw him as a sort of mentor. He was very fond of him, and described him as Tigger incarnate, from the Winnie-the-Pooh books, full of enthusiasms that he did not think through properly. This was not quite accurate I think, for Lalith was ambitious and planned carefully, but Richard, while not entirely disagreeing, saw him as nevertheless comparatively innocent, and a tool in the hands of President Jayewardene.